This study looks at German L1 pre-kindergarden children's acquisition of the lexeme so and the development of its versatile use to revise the currently inchoate didactic path for the L2 classroom. The analysis bases on a pragmatic, usage-based L1 acquisition framework (Tomasello 2008) and the classification of so as aspectual deixis according to the extended linguistic field theory of functional pragmatics (Ehlich 1986), with so referring to a feature of an object or action (Ehlich 1987). Ananalysis of 78 L2 German language textbooks (Heintges 2019, own data) shows that only two of the versatile uses of so foundin the books are thematized: consecutive sentences (so… , dass…)and comparative structures (so… , wie…).Audio-visual data collected in a L2 class room shows versatile realizations of soin both teachers' and students' utterances. Only one out of the ninerecorded kinds of uses, namely the comparative structure, is didacticizedin the used text book. (Nonnen/Heintges, own data) To bridge this gap,I analyze speechdata taken from a longitudinal data collection (Oldenburg corpora, Szagun 2004): 264 hours of transcribed audio-video recordings that were collected of six children over the run of two years (age 1;8 – 3;7 yrs.). The 2411 so tokens are categorized by function (semantic code) as well as structure (formal code) also considering actions, context, and gestures such as pointing. From this and the chronology of appearance in each child's data, conclusions about an acquisition pattern can be detected: firsta genuine so + gesture, then so + NP and so + AdvP. The reference to and comparison with (features of) actions and objects, first in the shared reference space, later as reference in phantasm (Bühler 1934), can be used to teach common structures of spoken discourse as e.g. so + NP and so + VP.
